Happiness: An Occasional User's Guide

(Published in Forbes Life India's Monsoon Edition, for their Curators of Interestingness series. I don't think I've ever enjoyed writing and researching a column more.)

For the last month, I’ve been unexpectedly contented, occasionally joyful, often outright happy, and this drove me round the bend for about two weeks. Here’s the problem with unexpected, apparently long-lasting happiness: I didn’t know why it was happening.

The closest thing humans have to a fear of happiness is cherophobia—more accurately a fear of experiencing joy—and I am, thankfully, not a sufferer. But before I diagnosed myself with Excessive Happiness Disorder (the syndrome exists), the explanation arrived. A month of reading about happiness studies, the art of happiness and happiness in general proves one of the great laws of happiness—it is, like the common cold, infectious.

There is also a second, subtler aspect to this that the positive psychology movement is only beginning to assess—happiness and neuroplasticity, or the idea, explored by the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran and others, that what you choose to pay attention to, read, or do, can rewire your brain for a variety of emotions. In other words, the brain can learn happiness, and mine was responding strongly to a steady stream of positivity.

Happiness studies has taken off in the last decade, and in just the last year, there have been a stream of books promising to teach us how to be happy, or to tell us why we’re not. But many of these attempts confirm another, and somewhat sadder, truth: the pursuit of happiness is not the same as the experience of happiness.

Lessons from a prison camp
The man who may have contributed the most to the current studies of happiness made his discoveries in circumstances that many gurus of positive psychology would consider absolutely inimical to pleasure, empathy or joy.

Viktor Frankl’s occupation in Nazi Germany was to study the minds of women who had become suicidal; he may have seen as many as 30,000 cases in the “suicide pavilion” before the brutal logic of World War Two came into play. Frankl was an Austrian Jew, and despite his work as a physician and the acclaim in which he was held, even by the Nazis, he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942. He ran a suicide watch unit at Theresienstadt, but in 1944, he was sent to first Auschwitz and then Turkheim. His wife, his father and his mother died in separate camps—his father of illness, while his wife and mother were murdered.

Liberated in 1945, returning to a home without family, Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in 1945. It was a psychiatrist’s objective account of life in the camps, but through it all ran Frankl’s three great truths. The first was that no matter what the circumstances of our lives, men and women had the power to exercise choice—in the camps, the choice came down sometimes to whether they would be good prisoners, or oppressors of other prisoners, sometimes the choice lay in how one experienced suffering. Frankl’s second sharing was that spiritual growth, a belief in one’s Maker, was something essential to the human spirit, and necessary to it—even in circumstances of extreme suffering. And his third was simple: “The salvation of man is through love and in love.” Even in the camps, the contemplation of his wife, the need to believe in love, would carry him—and others—through.

In Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy—a wonderful starting point for seekers after happiness—de Botton explores the approach made by the Greek philosophers to the experience of living. And from Socrates, whose life was lived in a constant search for what was true, rather than what could be conveniently accepted as the truth, to Epicurus, who taught the importance of living in the moment and working towards tranquil acceptance, de Botton notes that every philosopher of note advocated acceptance of the nature of life, in all its complexity and occasional sadness, as part of the key to happiness.

And perhaps it was Abraham Maslow who first proposed a 21st century understanding of the hows of happiness in his 1962 classic, Towards a Psychology of Being. He used his hierarchy of needs—first the physical, then the social, then the spiritual—to explain why humanity would always strive for transcendence. The ultimate human desire, in his view, was to “become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming”. But even as Maslow became influential in business studies and positive psychology, it was the material part of his hierarchy of needs that many of his students focused on—the needs for achievement, security, status were noted at the expense of the need for self-actualization and self-transcendence. Frankl, who lived for decades after his experiences in the camps, could have told Maslow’s disciples that they were going in the wrong direction.


Practical Magic

In 2010, Barbara Ehrenreich launched an attack on what she saw as the tyranny of the positive psychology movement, its self-absorption, the insistence among some gurus on denying negative emotions, and the growing materialism of the happiness movement. Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World was prompted by her own battle with breast cancer, and her refusal to buy into the “think positive” mantras surrounding recovery at the time, but being Ehrenreich, she moved far beyond the personal. Her attack was on what she saw as a culture of mindless positivity, which also had a more sinister undercurrent: if you were unhappy, it was your fault. Ehrenreich wasn’t having any of this.

Just four years before this, Rhonda Byrne had made a massive impact with her self-help book, The Secret, and in 2010, would follow this with The Power. Both bestselling books were built on the foundation of The Law of Attraction—the idea that you attract into your life the positive or the negative depending on your thoughts. Many critiqued Byrne: some neurologists questioned the idea that thoughts could affect events, some pointed out that the logical corollary of the premises of The Secret would be to blame tsunami survivors, for instance, for bringing a tsunami down on themselves.

Getting to the hows of happiness, though, reading The Power is illuminating. The Power advocates several exercises, from positive visualization to meditation-style work—and if you really put Byrne’s ideas into practice, you will spend an hour or three a day working on happiness. Depending on whether you believe in the “endless bounty of the universe”, the laws of attraction and the power of love, this may or may not get you the Malibu mansion with a newly-divorced Javier Bardem as your personal slave—but it will focus your mind powerfully on what does make you happy, just as an hour or two of exercise draws attention to your body’s needs.

Far more scientific than Byrne’s bestselling New Age wooliness is Sheena Iyengar’s powerful The Art of Choosing—a brilliant examination of why we make the life choices and personal choices we do, how these are culturally influenced, and how to make better choices. Iyengar eschews self-help language for incisive, thought-provoking explorations, and along with Gretchen Rubin’s mellow The Happiness Project, this is one of the two books I would pick as a practical guide to finding happiness. Rubin’s project started out as a blog, and her laws of happiness are a clear, persuasive distillation of wisdom drawn from several sources—Buddhist philosophy, Walden, The Simpsons and the joys of cleaning closets.

The true counterpoint to Byrne’s The Secret, though, is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert argues that what we think will make us happy—the new job, the perfect relationship, the fancy house—may not actually get us there; we are bad, as a species, at imagining the future accurately. If we really want to be happy, Gilbert argues, we should accept that happiness is unexpected, fleeting, but intense; we should practice self-awareness rather than projecting into an uncertain future. Martin Seligman’s equally seminal Authentic Happiness suggests that the way we choose to remember events, and to process the present, will be more conducive to lifelong happiness than the nature of the events themselves—and that wisdom is also what imbues His Holiness The Dalai Lama’s hugely influential The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living.

The gentle wisdom of the Dalai Lama says that happiness is in our own hands—but also takes this out of the personal into the wider world. If the purpose of life is to be happy, then we all have a responsibility to our environment, to contribute and to give back. He makes his point without preaching, and this is worth the price of a hundred shallow self-help books.


The garden and the battlefield

The writer Kiran Nagarkar, speaking of the Mahabharata, observed that it was an incredible feat of storytelling: which modern author would interrupt the battle that is the focus of the narrative in order to allow two characters to discuss the meaning of life? Of all the great religious texts, the Bhagavad Gita, and the conversation between a warrior and a god, captures the challenges of being happy in the middle of the vicissitudes of life perfectly. Here is what Arjuna faces: the prospect of killing those he knows well and has grown up with, of losing dear friends and family, and his question to Krishna is, very simply, why is this necessary? Krishna’s answer is, if you think about it, one of the keys to happiness: do not duck your dharma. Do what you have to do, on the battlefield, in the office, at home, and do it to the best of your ability. In that doing, you will find your answers.

But how can we be happy when life is filled with strife, death, challenges, discomfort, chaos? The Buddhist nun Pema Chodron had a quiet but powerful answer in her book, When Things Fall Apart: “We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart." This, she says, is the nature of life, and there is no easy path, only a simple one: learn the practice of letting go.

This concept is often misunderstood as abdication of responsibility, a dropping out from life; what Chodron wants us to work towards is its opposite, a deep acceptance of the unstable nature of life, and a letting go of the outcome of our actions—while continuing to do what is best for us. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche, goes even deeper, urging us to come to terms with the greatest and most pervasive fear of all—the fear of dying. Live your life as a preparation for death, see it as just another stage of life, and you will find your freedom, says Sogyal Rinpoche. And one of the best ways to deal with death lies in the cultivation of happiness.

In 1845, a man dropped out from the demands of his busy life, and set out to see whether he could create a life that was more suited to his essential nature. By living simply, in a cabin near Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau did not build a less busy life—the seasons and their ebb and flow, the necessity of tending to his garden, the presence of neighbours, all of these kept his hours and days in a constant hum of disciplined activity. As he wrote in Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

This is what often escapes many of the seekers after an easy route to happiness: Thoreau was not looking for an escape, or a retreat, but for a deeper, more meaningful life. In his pursuit of happiness, he was willing to spend time building and nurturing his dream, and he was willing to surrender completely to the reality of living out in the woods. He found his happiness the way Viktor Frankl, living in a concentration camp, did: not in escape, but in an acceptance of the burdens and small joys of every day, no matter how different the surroundings were for both men. They paid attention to themselves, and they thought deeply about their lives; and never, not for a moment, did they stop living their lives as best as they could.

Free speech: "Cannot you hold your tongue?"

(Published in Forbes India, January/ February 2011, for its Curators of Interestingness series.)


BOOKS: FREE SPEECH

“Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you?”
From Plato’s Apology, concerning the trial of Socrates.


In 399 BC, the finest and most prominent citizens of a state known for its commitment to justice and fairness gathered to decide on the fate of one of its best-known gadfly-philosophers. By the end of the meeting in Athens, Socrates had been sentenced to death, apparently for no greater crimes than “impiety” and “corrupting the youth”. He became the first free-speech martyr: his response to those who asked him to hold his tongue is often quoted.

“Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living—that you are still less likely to believe.”

These lines have formed the bedrock of the argument for free speech for centuries, along with John Stuart Mill’s 1859 pronouncement in On Liberty: “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”

The trial of Socrates, as it has been presented by Plato and Xenophon, is heartbreaking: there you have the Western world’s first free-speech martyr, put to death in the twilight of his life by a cruel state. The problem with this view, as IF Stone has pointed out, is that Athens was not a tyrannical state—it did not share the views of modern-day China, Burma or Korea on the evils of free speech and the value of censorship. The citizens of Athens acted out of character when it came to the trial of Socrates; they condemned him perhaps for political reasons (he had not spoken out against the rule of tyrants), perhaps for personal ones (the corruption of the youth previously mentioned), and only in part because his opinions made the state and its citizens uncomfortable.

The great contemporary battles over free speech are not dissimilar. We accept, in theory, that free speech is necessary for any functioning democracy; in practice, freedom of expression has never been a comfortable virtue to exercise. It’s not about what books one should be allowed to read, or about whether an author is right or wrong—free speech debates go to the heart of exploring any society’s areas of discomfort. Sometimes those have to do with sex and love; often they have to do with religion and faith; and occasionally, the discomfort comes from having one’s implicit beliefs about the society you live in challenged. Sometimes it’s the state that feels under attack, or that will work to protect itself against perceived criticism. But what we attack, as readers in India or the United States, tells us a great deal about what makes us deeply uneasy as human beings.

For two excellent primers on free speech issues, read PEN’s Freedom of Speech is No Offense—a collection of writings on free speech by authors across Britain—or Seagull India’s excellent Censorship series.

In the Germany of 1933, what we refer to now as the Nazi book-burnings began as a student protest, calling for a cleansing, a “Sauberung”. The German Student Association called for “Action against the un-German Spirit”, spoke of a need to “purify” German language and literature against the taint of Jewish intellectualism, and organized a series of book burnings across the country. The schedule was meticulously drawn up: a torchlight procession of students would arrive to parade music, the song ‘Brothers, Forward’ would be sung, and selected books and journals would be burned, followed by a group sing-a-long.

And so did Bertolt Brecht, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, among thousands of others, go to the flames. The list of authors burned is a very revealing list—from Thomas Mann to Erich Marie Remarque, Marcel Proust to Emile Zola and Upton Sinclair, what the young students in Germany were really blocking out was any kind of thought that might oppose Hitler’s doctrines. The Nazi regime depended on its existence on the idea that “pure” German thought and nationalism was under threat; and that the only way to defend the true spirit of Germany was to call for a purge.

Thirteen years later, there would be an unpleasant echo of the Nazi book-burnings, when the Allied troops decided in 1946 to purge about 30,000 books—all “undemocratic, militaristic and Nazi” literature and paintings. The principle was the same; the only difference is that the Allied armies did not continue their purges for as much time as Hitler’s youth.

In India, perhaps the most significant book ban after 1947 was the ban placed on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The ban on the Verses came into force in October 1988, and has never been lifted. The grounds for the ban were that the supposed blasphemy of the novel—where Rushdie uses the “Satanic” verses to explore and attack aspects of Islam, as part of a larger framework where he explores multiculturalism and diasporas—might cause violence in the country.

The logic of the Verses ban seems, at first glance, impeccable. An author has written a novel that is perhaps inflammatory, and that may offend many Muslims—it may even cause those offended, whether Muslim or not, to take to the streets in violence. But the deeper principle at work in the Satanic Verses case was whether India would uphold two basic and linked rights: the right of any citizen or writer to criticize faith in general and a religion in particular (the right to blaspheme, in effect), and the right of ideas that go against the flow of mainstream thought to be protected. Behind the legal ramifications of the Satanic Verses ban lies a simple question: are you free to question religion, or should religion be above question?

The Indian state, like many other democracies, has not made up its mind on the subject. In terms of offence, the rants of the Hindutva rightwing, for instance, or of hardline Muslim preachers, have been far more offensive, and urged listeners on to far more hatred than Rushdie has ever espoused. We are, as a country, sensitive on the subject of religion; in 1956, shortly after Independence, India banned Aubrey Menen’s Rama Retold. Menen’s retelling of the Ramayana was ruled to be scurrilous (it was, deliberately so) and potentially explosive. We are not yet comfortable with the idea that religion can be challenged—and mocked—in fiction.

Other Indian attempts to corral free speech have been largely political in nature. The brief ban on Taslima Nasreen’s Dwikhandito in West Bengal, the recent attempt to pillory Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and to present it as obscene and offensive, the ban on James Laine’s Shivaji—all of these were part of attempts by various political parties to gain mileage. Sometimes, it’s the state’s own broader concerns that come into play, as with Stanley Wolpert’s Nine Hours to Rama—banned because of Wolpert’s revelations about lacunae in the security given to Mahatma Gandhi.

One of the murkier areas for free speech is, for obvious reasons, sex: what is obscene to one person is another one’s liberating read. Ulysses, by James Joyce, was banned on the grounds that it might cause American readers to harbour “impure and lustful” thoughts; Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, was banned in France, and copies were seized in the UK after the Sunday Express called it “sheer unrestrained pornography”.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by DH Lawrence, became the subject of a landmark 1959 trial—against its use of “unprintable words” and the complaint that it was not the kind of book one would wish one’s “wife or servants to read”, the publishers successfully argued that it had literary merit. John Cleland’s cheerfully pornographic Fanny Hill is remarkable for having attracted obscenity suits from 1748 down to 1977, when it was proved to have sufficient “artistic value” to offset Cleland’s memoirs of a courtesan.
Closer to home, Ismat Chughtai’s Lajja (The Quilt) became the subject of an obscenity trial for its depiction of a relationship between two women—but the trial foundered on language; Chughtai had used no explicit terms. Mridula Garg’s Chittacobra was attacked for its sexual content—and for the fact that a woman was writing freely about desire—in the courts of a state known for the vast quantities of pulp Hindi porn it produced.

Perhaps the most fiercely contested areas of free speech have to do with politics. For years, Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter could not be read in South Africa, because her analysis of racial and sexual politics in the country flew in the face of the ruling regime’s lines of thought. George Orwell’s Animal Farm has always made some regimes deeply uncomfortable; countries supportive of Russia would not print it, and in Kenya, it was banned because Orwell’s animal insurrections were seen (correctly) as a criticism of corrupt leaders. In Russia, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s unsparing depiction of life in the gulags—and his extension of the metaphor of the gulag to the whole country—threatened the entire moral basis of the state. The manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago had to be typed in several friends’ houses, in hiding; and had to be smuggled out of the USSR before it could be printed.

And the most absurd instance of a free speech ban was probably the one that operated for years in China on Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll’s classic was placed on the list of dangerous books not for its incendiary content, or for its political ideas, but because “it was disastrous to put animals and human beings at the same level”. This line always calls up an image of an official in the Hunan province, deeply disturbed that Carroll’s Cheshire Cats and caterpillars have shaken up the natural order of the world!

Speaking Volumes: A quartet of poets

(Published in the Business Standard, June 20, 2011; one of the last mainstream papers left in India where you can send in an 800-word column on poetry and not be told to go write about Chetan Bhagat.)




No one could claim that poetry is dead in India; the closest we can come is the lament of the (English language) publisher who says that poetry doesn’t sell. We still think in rhyme and stanza, from the advertising jingles on TV to the slogans painted by the Border Roads Organisation on twisting mountain paths to the ancient mantra on trucks: “Bure nazar waala, tera muh kala.” This is what Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, poet, critic, a living, walking library, calls “a listenership”.

The “listenership” for Kabir and Lal Ded has stayed constant over the centuries; the words of these mystics of the 15th and 13th centuries have been internalised to the point where their dohas and vakhs form part of our subconscious grammar. To have fresh and definitive translations of two of the great mystics, by two of India’s most linguistically acute poets, is a major literary event. Ranjit Hoskote’s translation, I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics) came out within a month of the release of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Songs of Kabir (NYRB/ Hachette India).

Both mystics left behind patchwork biographies; in their times, as in ours, chronicling the lives of saints and of poets came a distant second to chronicling the lives of rulers and warriors. But Mr Mehrotra and Mr Hoskote have a similar understanding of what is important, and what is unessential: “An authentic Kabir poem, in the thousands attributed to him, may never be found, nor does it matter,” Mr Mehrotra writes in his introduction. “If you catch the spirit, anyone can write an authentic Kabir poem. Innumerable anonymous poets have done so in the past and continue to do so even today, adding their voices to his.”

And Mr Hoskote, acknowledging the many gaps in the popular rendering of the life of Lalla, explains: “Lalla, to me, is not the person who composed these vakhs; rather, she is the person who emerges from these vakhs.”





These books stand testimony to the argument that only poets should translate poets. Mr Mehrotra, translating Kabir’s Chewing Slowly, begins with an epigraph from the late poet Arun Kolatkar. Chewing Slowly describes how the seeker finally finds the beloved, only after cutting the cord with family, in-laws and the town’s inhabitants. The epigraph Mr Mehrotra chooses is from Kolatkar’s translation of the 14th century Marathi poet Janabai: “god my darling/ do me a favour and kill my mother-in-law.” There they are, speaking to each other across the ages; two translators who are also poets, placing in conversation with each other two poets who are also mystics. Mr Mehrotra’s translations are superb, true to the ear, true to the line; soaring with Kabir’s own images and Mr Mehrotra’s occasional contemporarisations. “Kabir knows everything,” he writes, “including a Jamaican sect and the name of a London publishing house.”

If you pressed either poet, Mr Mehrotra or Mr Hoskote, they might not be able to tell you with exactitude when one starts a translation. Mr Mehrotra’s translations of Kabir may have begun, technically, just a few years ago; but as he references Cavafy and Kolatkar and Rasta poets, what comes through in these precise, richly shaped lines is a lifetime’s understanding of poetry. Mr Hoskote writes, “I began this translation of Lal Ded’s poems in February 1991, a month short of twenty-two; I am nearly forty-two as I come to the end of the process.”

Living with Lalla’s words for years and decades shaped him; he had begun to translate her vakhs because she provided a connection to his own Kashmiri past, a lost heritage. But as he continued, he moved slowly to an engagement with faith, his life as a poet following the arc of the poet he was trying to translate and understand: the very different experience of “a religious seeker, a social rebel, a woman”. “The translator is always humbled, broken and remade in the act of translation.”

There is no room to write about the meaning of their lives and work, the four poets who are inexorably twinned twice over in these two books. And perhaps this column is not the right place in which to explore the kind of faith – so sharply opposed to the unassailable, mean-spirited dogma that passes often as faith these days – that Kabir and Lalla had to offer. That exploration should be done by one better versed in religious studies and in poetry than this columnist.

But these two mystics shared a similar path, a similar way of thinking. This verse, written by Lalla, could have been spoken by Kabir: “First the washerman pounded me on his washing stone,/ scrubbed me with clay and soap./ Then the tailor measured me, piece by piece/ with his scissors. Only then could I, Lalla, find the road to heaven.”

To read these translations is to rediscover what you already know and love, but also to have the well-known, cherished dohas and vakhs of Kabir and Lalla made new. Both Mr Hoskote and Mr Mehrotra ask an uncomfortable but thought-provoking question: what kind of reception would a Kabir or a Lalla be given today?

Would they be ignored, would they be invited to the literary festivals of the hour, would their words invite bans for offending religious sentiments, or would they, perhaps, still have an audience? I don’t have answers, but it’s an interesting questi

Book review: River of Smoke, by Amitav Ghosh

(Published in the Business Standard, June 17, 2011.)


River of Smoke
Amitav Ghosh
Viking/ Penguin India
533 pages, Rs 699

And yet, it is also so familiar: Everywhere you look there are khidmatgars, daftardars, khansamas, chuprassies, peons, durwans, khazanadars, khalasis and lascars.”
Letter to Paulette from Robin Chinnery.

In 1917, the Bengali writer Sharat Chandra released the first part of an epic, overstuffed and energetic novel that would become a classic of its times. Srikanta would keep its readers engaged – and waiting – till 1933, when the last instalment was published. Amitav Ghosh is kinder to his readers; it’s taken just three-and-a-half years for the second volume in the Ibis trilogy.

For those who were drawn in by the zest and exuberance of the first volume, Sea of Poppies, and were familiar with Srikanta, there may have been echoes of Sharat Chandra’s classic novel. Like Sharat Chandra, Mr Ghosh possesses an inexhaustible curiosity about voyages, migration and travellers; like Sharat Chandra, he is fascinated by the largely overlooked story of the East’s discovery of the East. In Srikanta, there’s a telling passage where the narrator boards ship for Rangoon, literally propelled into the unknown by his co-passengers: “The mighty stream of Punjabis, Bengalis, Madrasis, Gujaratis, Marathas, Afghans, Chinese, Marwaris and Biharis gushed into the cavern with the force and turbulence of a mountain cataract.”

In Sea of Poppies, Mr Ghosh served notice as we set sail on the Ibis along with him that he was intent on using the stereotypes of the past to draw an entirely new fictional landscape. The opium den so beloved of a certain generation of Western travel writers transformed into the opium factory seen from the point of view of the workers; the sati that shows up as an exotic, barbaric ritual worthy of horrified fascination in Jules Verne’s Around The World In Sixty Days is reimagined from the point of view of Deeti, a young woman who narrowly escapes her intended pyre. As Mr Ghosh marshaled his massive cast of characters and reimagined the Opium Wars (the view from the Orient, if you like), he often used his historian’s eye for detail to explode or explore what lay behind the clichés.

River of Smoke is as exuberant and as crammed with characters, set-pieces, wordplay, historical footnotes, history lessons, colourful dialogue and epistolary pyrotechnics as its predecessor. The Ibis, with its crew of girmitiyas destined for lives of indentured labour, has been caught in a cyclone, and in the first few chapters, Mr Ghosh pours something of that ferocious energy into a breathless updating of plotlines as the action shifts from the Indian Ocean to Canton’s 19th century waterways. Paulette, the orphaned amateur botanist who can pass for Bengali, stays largely offstage, as does Deeti, whose future serenity in the face of considerable odds is, however, hinted at.

Much of the story is carried by Bahram, the Parsi opium trader from Bombay, who provides the necessary view into the politics of the opium trade. Another perspective is offered by Robin Chinnery’s letters to Paulette, but while the letters have the verve and accuracy you might expect from an author who has attended closely to the Chinese Repository and the Canton Register, they feel like a clever and very artificial plot device — an easy way of giving the reader the potted history of Canton and the Opium Wars. It’s a clunky way to take you to Fanqui-town.

But there’s no need to get into a spudder. The glee with which Mr Ghosh ransacks Hobson-Jobson, lascar’s dictionaries, pidgins, creoles, patois and odd dialects might have the unwary reader’s head going gidigidi, but if you no-savvy a particular line, the next paragraph will probably have a sufficient cumshaw to make your labours worthwhile. At its worst, when several dictionaries collide on the same page, the linguistic foreplay brings to mind Edward Lear’s immortal poem, The Cummerbund: “She sate upon her Dobie, – / She heard the Nimmak hum, – / When all at once a cry arose, – / 'The Cummerbund is come!” At its best, this gleeful reinvention of the English language is too muchi good inside.

If River of Smoke doesn’t make the same impact as Sea of Poppies, that’s inevitable — the second volume of most trilogies is where you enter the broad, placid mid-river stretch, and where there’s more explication than action. Some readers will miss the characters they’d grown attached to in Sea of Poppies, and despite a judicious rash of hangings, gunboat raids and the fear over the fate of Fanqui-town as the Chinese clash with the Europeans, River of Smoke is sometimes becalmed, sometimes sagging under its own weight.

What it does offer is a deepening, alternate view of history — specifically the Opium War, but in a broader sense, of the history of the East. The multiple characters and his love for the rapid digression give Mr Ghosh a way of representing the 19th century trade wars via a rainbow coalition — this is history seen, as in almost all of his novels, from the perspective of the ordinary, overlooked bystander.

The motley crew whose competing stories are pulled together in River of Smoke are offering more than just entertainment. Over a century ago, G A Henty wrote swashbuckling stories of adventure and skullduggery where the natives were always the villains, the white men always the heroes. Mr Ghosh’s crammed-to-the-gills cabinet of wonders presents the view from the other side. When this also includes plausibly presented origin stories for the game of cricket or for chai-garam and other clever bits of bandobast, it makes for a splendid tamasha.

Speaking Volumes: Some notes on Sir Vidia's spleen

(Published in the Business Standard, June 7, 2011)

1. The fact that I possess a womb should disqualify me from commenting on V S Naipaul’s latest broadside. A writer who believes that no woman is his equal as a writer, that women suffer from a “sentimentality, a narrow vision of the world” and that women writers are “quite different” is not going to take the criticism of women readers seriously.

2. Which isn’t going to stop me or other owners of wombs anyway.

3. Not that Mr Naipaul’s criticisms should shock anyone, after all these years. A list of Sir Vidia’s targets over the decades includes Africans, Muslim invaders in India, infies (inferior people) of all colours and races, Indian women writers, his wives, his lovers, his friends, his editors, including the nonagenarian Diana Athill, the issuers of worthless degrees (Oxbridge), foolish people, people who do not serve him his vegetables in separate dishes, people who have not read his writings, people who have read but not understood his writings, people who have read and understood his writings but have also read writers he disapproves of, which is most writers, regardless of whether they own wombs or not.

4. So the best way to approach this fracas is to repeat the apocryphal line Ved Mehta is supposed to have said after Mr Naipaul had a spat with the German ambassador’s wife in Neemrana: “You’ll never guess what that terrible old man has gone and done now.” The spat, now forgotten, was over Mr Naipaul’s dismissal of a certain woman intellectual, to which the German ambassador’s wife is supposed to have said: “We all know what your views on women are, Sir Vidia, we don’t have to take them seriously,” which put the Nobel laureate in a towering rage.

5. There’s a very old pattern at work here; the wide, and widening, gap between Mr Naipaul the public figure and Naipaul the writer. The bulk of the pronouncements made by Mr Naipaul the public figure are rubbish — cantankerous, peevish statements meant to provoke anger and irritation. Some commentators suggested that this was a version of the West Indian tradition of picong — the swift trading of insults and banter as a kind of conversational game — but the truth is that it’s just spleen. The few interviews given by Mr Naipaul the writer, most notably his Paris Review interview, in 1998, are illuminated with insight and wisdom, despite all the bigotry and the petulance of the public man.

6. Read this sentence by Mr Naipaul: “I think the world is what you enter when you think – when you become educated, when you question – because you can be in the big world and be utterly provincial.” And then this sentence by Jane Austen, whom he slammed for her “sentimental ambitions”: “The literary world is inspiring, but it is not all there is. I let my daily life be my raw material, even if paintings, fiction and sonatas are the fire in my forge.” They led such different lives; Mr Naipaul wrested for himself the freedom to travel, to learn and to explore. Ms Austen, trammelled by the twin lack of independence and income, wrote her novels from the observation of the limited world around here, but she shares with Mr Naipaul several things: the sense of humour, the detached accuracy and the lack of sentimentality. They had a similar, excoriating wit, though Ms Austen’s was caustic, Mr Naipaul’s splenetic.

7. There is little need to address Mr Naipaul’s central grouse, with its implication that women cannot write, or that women writers are by definition sentimental. It displays his lack of reading — could anyone who had read Hilary Mantel, Lionel Shriver, Marilyne Robinson, Margaret Atwood, Mary Shelley, Susan Sontag and company actually believe this? You could, of course, if you were a fossil, a relic from another age.

8. I could go back to Mr Naipaul’s work — not the disappointing late novels that show the waning vigour and drooping powers of a played-out novelist, or the feeble African travelogue, but the humour and sharp acuity that marked books like A House for Mr Biswas, or The Mimic Men, or A Bend in the River. Books from the time when Mr Naipaul’s ability to see things clearly had not been overtaken by his arrogance and his choler. But instead, I find myself reaching for Pride and Prejudice. The novel’s comedy is restorative, and nothing could be more appropriate to the present situation than the title.

Speaking Volumes: Tahmima Anam's The Good Muslim

(Published in the Business Standard, May 31, 2011)

Writing in the shadow of the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, Salman Rushdie commented: “The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex.”

There’s a reason why most literary attempts to enter into the mind of the fundamentalist fail. Writers live by their ability to imagine their way into the lives, minds and souls of strangers; to be a writer is to admit at least a curiosity about ways of thinking different from your own. It is hard to imagine what the closed mind of a fundamentalist might be like, and for most writers, this is truly alien territory. Most literary portraits of the true believer are either risible – John Updike’s cartoon terrorist – or not entirely convincing, as with Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, where so much of the book is spent trying to persuade us that the narrator’s shift into fundamentalist thinking is plausible.

This may be Tahmima Anam’s great achievement; to create a fundamentalist who is entirely plausible because she makes him so empathetic. Her second novel, The Good Muslim, is set in Bangladesh — a “broken wishbone of a country”, which in 13 years has seen war, cannibalised its ancient forests and murdered two presidents. “A fast-acting country: quick to anger, quick to self-destruct.”The Good Muslim is a sequel to The Golden Age, Ms Anam’s first novel, which followed the life of the widowed Rehana Haque, in the wake of the 1971 war. The protagonists are Rehana’s children, Maya and Sohail, who both carry deep scars from 1971.

Maya, a doctor, has worked with the “birangonas”, the women who were dubbed heroines and left to survive the abuse, violence and rape of the war; Sohail has his own memories of his revolutionary days and his time in the army. His transformation into the good Muslim of the title, a preacher whose growing faith in religion elbows out all else – his family, his old friends, his son – is gradual and inexorable. He had been, his sister thinks at one point, the opposite of a religious man. “He had laughed and joked about it, and he had been angry at a religion that could be so easily turned to cruelty.”

Ms Anam’s deft retelling of history, as she moves between the 1970s and the 1980s, is based on a threefold understanding: she draws on her own memories as a child born after the ’71 War whose family was unmistakably marked by it, by her skills as a researcher and the years she spent listening to the testimony of survivors, and she draws on her writer’s ability to slip inside the skin of her characters. She explains just as much of Bangladesh’s history as required, producing almost a journalistic account of a country’s slow slipping into religious fundamentalism through Maya and Sohail’s story.

For Maya, watching her brother pick up the mantle of a respected preacher who will use his powers as a man and a religious leader in disastrous ways, the shift in Sohail leaves her helpless. “The future was suddenly clear: he was going somewhere, somewhere remote and out of reach, somewhere that had nothing to do with her, and that even if he didn’t disappear altogether, she would, from now on, be left behind.” The Good Muslim is one of the most engaging and disquieting novels to come out of Bangladesh in years, in either English or Bengali.

TAILPIECE
Delhi’s close-knit publishing world has gone through a version of a Cabinet reshuffle. Former Penguin Canada CEO David Davidar announced his plans to start a new publishing house, Aleph, in collaboration with Rupa & Co, amid speculation that two – and possibly three – of Penguin India’s key players had quit to join him. Random House’s flamboyant editor, Chiki Sarkar, takes over the chief editor’s mantle from the very capable Ravi Singh at Penguin India; Mr Singh quit a month after Mr Davidar’s return to India.

Mr Davidar, once seen as a front runner for the top job at Penguin USA, quit as CEO, Penguin Canada after his colleague Lisa Rundle filed a sexual harassment suit against him. Mr Davidar maintained the relationship was consensual. In India, everyone’s watching to see if Aleph will allow him to replicate the kind of success he had when he set up Penguin India in 1987.

It’s a crowded field today. With at least seven major players in the English language trade publishing scene in Delhi, the question is whether the market is big enough to support all of them. The numbers, in terms of readership, distribution and market share, suggest that at least two publishing houses will go under in the next five years.

The bigger question for readers is whether any of them, from Aleph to HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, Rupa or Westland, has developed a distinct identity. With houses sharing authors, and with editors switching frequently from one house to another, it’s only the independent publishing houses, not the mainstream players, who have much in the way of individuality any more. The challenge for Mr Davidar, Ms Sarkar and the rest won’t be profitability — it will really lie in whether they can create distinctive brands for their respective publishing houses.

Speaking Volumes: Badal Sircar--the conscience keeper

(Published in the Business Standard, May 17, 2011)

What can I write? I am no writer of essays. I am a theatre man. I wrote some plays because I am a man of the theatre, not because I am a writer.” Badal Sircar, letter to The Drama Review, November 1981.

There were few headlines; the death of Badal Sircar this Friday at the age of 86 in Calcutta, as it was called, was tucked away, eclipsed by the toppling of the Left Front. It had been years since homage had been truly paid to the playwright, but it is almost certain that he would not have cared. For Sircar, immersed in writing and reading (one of the last books he was reported to be re-reading was Sukumar Ray’s fantastic gem, Abol Tabol) right up to the end of his days, tributes were unnecessary.

I did wonder, though, whether the office-goers of Calcutta knew what they had lost. So many of them must have remembered the late 1960s and the 1970s, when Badal Sircar, unable to afford the fees of a proper proscenium theatre, began to hold performances in the open air — at Nandan, in the maidans, often timing the shows for the lunch hour, making a ritual of the Saturday performances.

Sircar has often been called the most middle class of playwrights, and he was that; but he was so much more than that. He was a town planner, who became an actor, influenced by his memories of the London stage, in the 1950s. Perhaps that’s where his empathy for the ordinary Calcuttan came from; he wrote of Satabdi, his theatre troupe: “None of the Satabdi members are paid anything. They work in banks, schools, offices, factories: they assemble in evenings exhausted by loveless work and sardine-packed public transport.” They were, in effect, just the same as the audience he attracted when he came up with the idea of the Third Theatre, which eschewed the props and formal paraphernalia of the stage and pulled the audience in as participant.

Sircar’s plays had a way of surviving and moving far beyond the confines of Bengal — college theatre troupes across India have had Evam Indrajit and Michchil in their repertoire for decades, but his reach was greater than that. His plays travelled often to villages, the script sometimes transforming to meet the needs of that set of local players; every street theatre group in India paid homage to either the plays themselves or to Sircar’s stagecraft.

In so many ways, he is still a playwright of our times — especially these times, when the middle class is discovering its conscience at Jantar Mantar, or attempting to make sense of the Maoist insurgency. Evam Indrajit, written in 1963 and first performed in 1965, introduced a writer, a cast of “normal” characters, Amal, Bimal and Kamal, whose lives were sedate, ordinary and not appropriate fodder for theatre — and Indrajit. In an exchange between Indrajit and the writer, Indrajit asks: “Then how shall we live?”

The Writer replies: Walk! Be on the road! For us there is only the road. We shall walk. I now have nothing to write about — still I have to write. You have nothing to say — still you have to talk. For us there is only the road — so walk on.”

This exchange, which could have come from Brecht or Beckett, was pure Sircar, written in a clipped, colloquial Bangla few playwrights had mastered before him. His plays, from Michchil to Baki Itihas and Pagla Ghoda were timely and disquieting; the attempt was to stir up the dormant middle-class conscience, and in the maidan crowds of Calcutta, he had the audience he needed.

Bashi Khabar took Sircar’s growing obsession with the Santhal revolt — the unsung war of the tribals against the state — and made it as deathless as Mahasweta Debi’s Birsa Munda would; Michchil, written in 1972 against the background of Naxalism about the state-sponsored disappearance of young men finds just as many echoes today. About Bashi Khabar, which featured a murdered man who wandered silently among the chorus and among the audience, his existence denied by another young male protagonist, Sircar wrote: “Each of us was that young man, trying our best to deny the existence of the ‘killed man’ in our midst and yet not wholly succeeding.”

But of all of Sircar’s plays, the much-performed, the almost-forgotten, the adaptations he did so skillfully from Brecht, the original plays that passed into the alphabet of the country’s theatre performers, what stays with me most are the figures of Kena and Becha (Bought and Sold), the two thieves who appear in Hattamala. This was one of Badal Sircar’s most light-hearted, if most political, plays, and children have been amused for decades by this story of two thieves set down in a land where money and possessions have no meaning.

In Sircar’s world, though, Kena and Becha loomed large; if we didn’t learn how to live, how to speak or write the things that mattered, we would give over our lives to thieves who only understood a world where everything could be bought and sold. Every one of his plays, and his performances, militated for a better world than this.